The Inside Job
by John Bigboote
Summary: More wiggles for the squiggles.


" _I know what you're wondering. What's a place like me doing in a girl like this?"_

\- Evelyn, _The Mummy_

" _How do I get out of this chickenshit outfit?"_

\- Hudson, _Aliens_

* * *

Cindy must have been getting pretty desperate now that she was relying on a stack of giant toy robots to take Gwen out. She called her little playset the Spider Slayer, and she wouldn't stop bragging about it was her "perfect masterpiece" Gwen would never be able to outmatch. It was definitely something only a geek could have thought up: A three-part arrangement of death machines that consisted of a robotic beetle riding piggyback on a robotic grasshopper, while the grasshopper was riding piggyback on a robotic scorpion.

Gwen performed a backflip, a cartwheel, and a pirouette to quickly avoid a volley of heat-seeking missiles fired from the grasshopper's back legs. The Spider Slayer was certainly an ugly batch of critters, but it was also _fast_ , and Cindy's psychotic digitized laughter wouldn't stop blaring over its built-in loudspeakers as it attacked. Gwen hated this weird evil Cindy who stayed locked away in her lab all day coming up with new diabolical schemes for turning Gwen into her biology homework. Why couldn't she be more like the nice Cindy who dressed up as Silk and was fun to hang out with?

Gwen heard a high-pitched resonance sailing toward her head. She stretched her legs into a split to crouch under a laser fired from the beetle's mandibles. A second later, the sound of gravel slipping behind her alerted her that a chunk of concrete wall was collapsing. She quickly rolled and avoided the sawed-off debris just before a massive percussion solo would have crushed her neck into a Radioactive Gwencake. She had to deal with a lot of close calls like that.

Gwen vaulted toward the Slayer and curled in the air to dodge another missile-laser combo while Cindy was screaming _"Die, Spider-Grunge!"_ But that one didn't even make sense. Gwen was in a punk band. Grunge was something completely different. Plus dying was never really her thing.

Gwen landed flat against the Slayer's middle grasshopper component and crawled around looking for a weak point on the trilogy of terror. Her wrist webbing wasn't powerful enough to block off any of its gun turrets or missile pods. Trying to kick it on one of its three stacked faces just resulted in a loud clanging sound and her ankle hurting really bad. The vibrating pain shooting through her leg was made even worse by Cindy constantly laughing at her foolish efforts.

God, she just wanted to rip the speakers out of this stupid thing.

She was busy trying to wrench the scorpion's armor panels apart when a distinct mechanical whirring sound rose up just beside her. She turned her head and looked shocked through her mask as the shadow of the grasshopper's spring-loaded front leg swung diagonally at her. The blunt metal talon smashed across her face and sent her spiraling back to the floor.

The mandibles of the beetle robot hacked up a smoke bomb while Gwen was slowly climbing off her knees and shaking her head. It landed on point just in front of her feet and instantly exploded into a cloud of vapor that made her frantically wheeze and cough.

The pain throbbing in Gwen's head from her crash landing faded away and was replaced with a dull ringing. Her arms lowered to her sides and her legs started to wobble as a Stage 1 paralytic venom laced through her system and relaxed her muscles. The grasshopper component of the Spider Slayer easily caught her by firing its antenna outward on titanium cables and reeling her in by her waist to get a closer look.

" _White Widow, huh? I think we're better off calling you Lonesome Loser!"_ Cindy's voice maniacally gloated over the Slayer's intercom. The headlights that formed the scorpion's eyes flickered with the tempo of her voice.

The beetle robot scurried off of the grasshopper's robot back. Gwen fought sluggishly as the grasshopper's wires tilted her backwards and the beetle stationed itself behind her. The beetle's armored shell flipped open and folded into a flat basin that could be used as a sterile operating gurney. Gwen was carefully placed on her back as her sense of awareness faded in and out.

Bathed in the intense lights lining the beetle's shell, she heard the distant spinning and droning of hydraulic equipment looming down at her. The scorpion's pincers opened into a pair of screaming power scalpels. The grasshopper's front legs extended into a point and transformed into massive syringes hanging over Gwen's head. The clear glass chambers above the needles were filled with flickering specks she could only see when she squinted. The syringes stored trillions of nanomachine larvae that all required only one thing: a living host.

Somewhere in the cozy fortified darkness of her lab, Cindy was huddled over a monitor displaying an x-ray scan of Gwen's body. She chuckled grimly to herself.

" _Don't be afraid of my cyber-babies_ ," her voice said from the Slayer's audio system. _"Your immune system isn't going to like this, but I've been told it mostly just tickles a lot."_

The wide-eyed look on Gwen's mask said she was nothing but afraid. The grasshopper's antenna wires extended up her costume and reached under her hood. They carefully pushed up her mask until her mouth and nose were uncovered. Her pink highlights flopped over her shoulders as her hair become partially unbundled.

The scorpion held out its scalpel-claws and surveyed the front of her body for a nice spot with vulnerable fatty tissue. The scalpels descended to the sides of her waist while the scorpion's tail sagged downward over the grasshopper and toward her head. In place of a stinger, the tail's plated tip opened to reveal a clear breathing mask. The rest of its segments functioned as a long tube for transporting sleeping gas.

Gwen put up one last groggy struggle with her arms before the breathing mask was fitted over the exposed half of her face. Her eyes closed under her spider mask, while her brain signals were recorded by the sensors in the beetle's shell and showed she was out cold.

The scalpels never made contact with her skin, but they sliced along the edges of white stripes above her hips to create two windows in her costume. The scorpion pulled its pincers back while the grasshopper learned forward. The grasshopper snapped its front syringe-legs together like the arm on a claw machine, plunging its needles into Gwen's bare sides and through the muscle fibers somewhere a few inches just shy of her kidneys. She remained motionless on the beetle's shell and breathed normally through the scorpion's tail as the grasshopper injected with swarms of its electronic larvae.

The nanites were pushed through Gwen's veins and vital organs using pressure from the falling hydraulic pistons on the back of the grasshopper's giant syringe legs. The high-powered sensors inside the beetle's shell constantly refreshed its scan of Gwen's anatomy as her Infestation Level rapidly escalated from None to Severe. Pent up steam blasted out of the back of the pistons once the syringes were completely unloaded.

The Spider Slayer had completed its task. The grasshopper withdrew its needles from Gwen's soft sides and crouched into a standby position on the scorpion's back. The scorpion activated a secondary function that turned its pincers into a motorized sewing kit and mended the stripes on Gwen's costume back together with machine precision. It lifted the breathing mask off of her face and went idle like the grasshopper.

The grasshopper moved its antennae to lift Gwen out of the beetle's shell-gurney and carefully deposit her on the ground. The beetle closed up shop and returned to the top of the insectoid pyramid by rocketing up to the grasshopper's back.

Gwen gradually returned to the world of the waking as the anesthetic toxins wore off. As she crawled back up, the Spider Slayer finished its last order of business by having the beetle component open its mouth and release flickering neon mist on her, dousing her in a final spray of growth ions.

The electronic parasites had already spread all the way to her brain and made her into a puppet of bone and meat. Microscopic monsters were nibbling through her insides and slowly breaking down her proteins and nutrients for their own nefarious purposes, but the artificial chemicals and computer viruses surging through her mind fooled her into thinking it was all for the better. The only thing that could save her now was a rare synthetic antigen that would shut down the nanites and dissolve them before they did too much damage, but it would have to be injected soon for it to be effective, and Cindy had no intention of sharing it.

Gwen calmly straightened her hood and fixed her mask so pulled over her chin and covered her mouth again. She acted strangely aloof while she stood as silently as the Spider Slayer parked in front of her. The only times she made any kind of gesture were when she would occasionally scratch one of her sides through the creases of her costume.

" _Your diagnostics look okay, all things_ _considered_ ," Cindy's voice boomed from the Slayer. _"What do you say, Spider-Goon? I can probably use you for a couple of weeks until those things devour you alive from the inside out. And once that happens... well, we'll keep it a surprise."_

Gwen would have shuddered at the thought if she still had the ability to feel fear. She lifted her head like it was on a ratchet joint and answered back in a cold voice.

"It doesn't matter what test you ask me to take or what task you require me to complete. I'll excel at it."

* * *

"Is it just me, or has Gwen really sucked lately?"

MJ was on the verge of losing her composure as she whispered to the other members of the band. She was covering the mic with her palm so the tower of speakers in the back of the garage wouldn't pick up her voice and blast her concerns through the whole neighborhood. Betty and Glory were silently nodding with her. Gwen was the only one still playing her part, banging her drums in a wild but repetitive loop.

"It's not just you," Betty said while she was putting down her guitar. "She's been acting like a weirdo ever since the last concert. Everything she plays is ass. It's just the same five chords over and over again."

"Yeah. She got like this right after that Arachno-Chick went completely crazy and teamed up with Dr. Robitchnik," Glory sounded worried as she stepped back from her keyboard. "I guess Captain Stacy was right about her after all."

The band looked over their shoulders toward their drummer as she continued banging out an uninterrupted percussion beat. Gwen only slowed down once in a while so she could slide her hand below her frayed halter tee and scratch the Band-Aid tucked on the side of her midriff. She'd been telling everyone she scraped her sides while she was skating.

MJ raised her voice over the clanging noise to get Gwen's attention while still trying to sound friendly.

"Gwen, honey, we're done with practice. You don't need to keep doing that."

Gwen responded by instantly dropping her sticks and lifelessly slumping over the drum kit. Her forehead whacked against the cymbals as the punchline.

"What's wrong with her?" Glory said while she blinked at the passed out drummer. "Too many all-nighters?"

"Drugs?" Betty suggested.

"Mono?" MJ suggested.

"You don't think this is some kind of delayed grieving thing over Peter, do you?" Glory suggested.

No one suggested "Being consumed over the past several days by a collective of artificial parasites that were now the only thing giving her an internal structure and preventing her from melting into a puddle of shapeless hollowed-out flesh."

Gwen jerked in her stool from what seemed like a nerve spasm. A crunching sound similar to a decayed tree trunk splitting apart echoed off the garage's cramped acoustics.

Her new self was grotesquely revealed as her back peeled open and her human appearance shed away like a Spectacular Gwencoon. Underneath her false living disguise, she was either a single mechanical parasite that had molted to adult size or a swarm of trillions of parasites that had replicated and merged together into a single entity. The finished product was an android that incorporated all of Gwen's abilities and genetically mimicked her body in the same sleek chrome armor as the Spider Slayer's components.

Intricate hydraulic joints made her just as light and agile as her discarded organic self. Tiny automated web spinnerets were embedded on the front of her wrist circuits. But her most chilling feature was her face. It was based on the featureless look of her spider mask, with only the vague structure of a nose, no indication of a mouth, and two large flat circles for eyes. It was like someone had scribbled them on a mirror with some lipstick.

Gwen slowly rose up from her stool and emotionlessly kicked her drum kit and her dried out human husk away. She had been reborn as a machine completely under the control of her creator.

The other band girls screamed and ran out of the garage as Death Metal made her debut appearance.

* * *

 _Author's note: Calling her White Widow is my subtle rejection of Marvel renaming her Ghost Spider. What the hell does that even mean?_

 _Author's note 2: This fanfic was inspired by things that actually occur in nature. Look up zombie caterpillars and emerald cockroach wasps sometime._


End file.
